LETTER: No simple answers to gun violence

The mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., obliges us all to consider how such an event can occur.

We should consider how any mind, no matter how deranged, can formulate the idea to shoot first graders. Similarly, we should consider why our children reach for a gun and shoot each other over clothing, drugs, or an insult.

Advertisement

Gun control is mechanical and particularly a probabilistic solution gun violence - the premise is, because the tool may enable the phenomenon, remove the tool and the phenomenon may happen less often. At the same time as Newtown, 22 Chinese schoolchildren were wounded by a deranged person wielding a knife. This was seized on as proof of the value of gun control, because with a knife they were only wounded. I suggest a different conclusion: It was mere chance that the perpetrator only wounded them; the result could well have been the same as at Newtown.

Regarding semi-automatic assault weapons, New York currently has a ban identical to the 1994 federal ban, based on them accommodating a magazine holding more than 10 rounds, and being designed with two or more features which make them look like the fully automatic military guns they are sometimes derived from. Guns with completely different design shooting the same bullet and thus having the same destructive power are legally available.

Whether the banned features multiply the guns' potential to kill is at best questionable, and statistics show that the 1994 federal ban had a negligible effect on crime, significantly because assault weapons are used in a tiny fraction of crime to begin with.

As regards sporting purposes, AR semi-automatic rifles, derived from the military's M16 machine gun, are the predominate gun used in civilian rifle competitions, which were originally established by Congress. Statistics say that 55,000 people participate in those competitions per year, and millions more use the same guns, legally and peacefully, in informal target shooting. The claim that they have no sporting purpose is false.

There are no simple answers to this question. We need to exert ourselves to get past politicization and hankering for quick, popular fixes, to come to terms with what underlies gun violence. To start, all sides need to do better than spouting canned political dogma particularly if it's based on falsehoods.